What Happens to Waste that Can’t be Recycled?

As a waste management company our ambition is, one day, to see nothing at all going into landfill. For this to happen there will need to be some upstream changes to the way that goods are manufactured and packaged. In the meantime, we have a mission to make sure that as little as possible of the waste we collect ends up in the ground.

Landfill sites are filling up fast and need long-term management to ensure that hazardous materials don’t escape into the environment or water table. It is not the cheap ‘throw away and forget’ option that previous generations thought it was.

Despite the extensive recycling facilities we use there are still some materials that cannot be recycled, which we talked about recently. Hopefully this helped to remove some of the confusion.

One of the areas that seems to cause most confusion is clothing and textiles. There’s a mistaken belief that clothing banks only want clothes that can still be worn. This is not the case.

Can All Clothing be Recycled?

Short answer: yes! There is no reason ever to put unwanted or worn out clothing in the bin. Yet, according to the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), nearly one third of our clothes end their lives in the bin and in landfill. Research is now showing that in the airless environment of a modern landfill site even organic fibres take a long time to decompose.

The good news is that even clothes that are too worn to be reused can be recycled into items such as industrial blankets and cushion stuffing. At Wellington Waste, we recycle all clothing, which is collected on a regular basis by the Children’s Air Ambulance Charity.

For us, landfill is very much the last option. If we can recycle it, we do. If it can’t be recycled, we aim to use our digester to deal with the waste on-site.

So, while our modern society continues to produce waste materials that cannot be recycled, there are still plenty of alternatives to landfill. And if you hire one of our skips for your next clearance or DIY project, you can be confident that we’ll be using every one of those alternatives to the full.